If I had one recommendation to people launching new web projects, it would be that you need to present value right up front. Often I see new projects launch with a message of “subscribe and find out what I’m going to be doing”, which may work for some people who are hugely popular already, but I don’t think works for 99.9% of people.

For example, if you launch a YouTube channel, you really should have a video up by the time you announce it that either acts as a trailer for what’s to come, or that is an example of the content you are going to be creating. It’s hard enough to get people to subscribe from inside a well-produced video, so telling folks to go to an empty channel page and hit the subscribe button isn’t a very strong sell. That can extrapolate out to newsletters, blogs, and any other creative work online.

Oh, and if you’re going to be charging for the thing, just re-read the above paragraph with 10x the intensity.

If you’re just having fun and don’t really care about subscriber count or revenue numbers, then do whatever you want. But if you are launching something and you plan on refreshing your analytics page throughout the day to see how it’s doing, then you really need to think about what value you’re offering people right up front.